I was in Seattle on the morning of September 11, 2001, getting ready to go to work at my job at Microsoft. I grabbed some coffee, turned on the television, and found myself struggling to instantly process the unbelievable news that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City. Then I watched in disbelief as a second plane hit the other tower--this must be an attack. And then the towers collapsed. I had lived in New York City through college and a couple of years beyond. (I was living there when Philip Petit, who I had seen often in my neighborhood doing juggling tricks on his unicycle, walked a wire between the twin towers.) Watching the compounding horrors on CNN, I became a New Yorker again, and it was my city under attack. I thought of my many friends who still lived or worked in Manhattan, and it struck me that they would already have been at their jobs. My friend Bob worked in a nine-story building right at the foot of the towers. I called his wife. She had just gotten a call from him. He had just turned on his work computer when the first tower was struck. He felt the concussion, swiveled his chair toward the window, and saw the tail section of an airplane drop past it. He hit the stairwell, burst out onto the street, and joined a crowd of people headed north, away from the towers. He told me later that people were scared but not running, just walking away purposefully and quietly. Then the second plane hit, and it was bedlam, with everyone running for their lives. He managed to hail a cab, which drive him all the way to his home in the suburbs. Other friends who lived or worked nearby had other nightmarish stories—being covered in ash, seeing the arrival of the first responders and watching them run TOWARD the buildings before they collapsed.

I drove to work. My Microsoft division was holding an all-hands meeting that day. Our vice president was in a huddle near the entrance of a huge conference hall with his leadership team. At first, he was adamant that the meeting take place as scheduled. Otherwise, the terrorists win, he argued forcefully. But it didn’t take much more conversation to convince him of the obvious—that no meaningful work could possibly be done that day, and we were dismissed.

It’s true that we were united as a country that day. We had been attacked. This was my generation’s Pearl Harbor. I was impressed by the initial response of both President Bush and Mayor Guiliani, two politicians who I had absolutely nothing in common with until 9/11. The heroism of the people in the towers and at the Pentagon, the first responders, the people on Flight 93, and the thousands of men and women who enlisted—that is the collective remembrance that must be burned forever into all of our American brains. It was phenomenal. There are no words.

It’s almost as difficult to find words to describe what has happened to our country since September 11, 2001. What would my reaction have been if on September 12 of that year it would have been revealed to me would happen between then and now—how we would go off the rails as a country? That we would invade and occupy Afghanistan to capture Bin Laden, only to allow him to escape, and stay there for twenty years. That the Republican President, Vice President, Defense Secretary, Secretary of State, and most Democratic Party leaders would purposely collude in the concoction of A Monstrously Big Lie justifying the invasion of another country—Iraq, which has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11--under false pretenses. A dark day in American history if there ever was one.  That our “war on terror” would last twenty years, kill nearly 10,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, and cost us $6 trillion. That 9/11 would spawn the first totally baseless, Internet-driven, “don’t believe what you saw with your own eyes” Monstrously Big Lie, the 9/11 Truther Movement, that would set the template for a tsunami of hysterical and completely bogus online disinformation campaigns that, with the enthusiastic assistance of the country’s largest “news” network, would eventually be accepted as a the “real reality” by nearly a third of Americans. That America would be run for eight years by the first African-American President (who would finally kill Bin-Laden), but that his successor would be a proud racist and fascist who looked approvingly on right-wing, domestic terrorism and whose response to his failed re-election campaign would be to incite a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol and to concoct another Monstrously Big Lie, this one designed to destroy our faith in our system of free and fair elections. That Americans, who had pulled together to eradicate many deadly diseases in the previous century, would allow a global pandemic to get the best of us because nearly a quarter of us wouldn’t get vaccinated because they embraced a bogus, politically driven, science-phobic alternate reality.

Twenty years after the unity of 9/11/01, we’re under attack by terrorists again. This time, our response must be better than the misguided and dangerous steps we’ve taken since those planes were flown into the twin towers. Because this time the terrorists are us.